possible the nights are longer up here than they were down on the Highway?’ Gentle wondered.
‘It seems so,’ Pie said. ‘My bowels tell me the sun should have been up hours ago.’
‘Do you always calculate the passage of time by your bowels?’
They’re more reliable than your beard,’ Pie replied.
‘Which direction is the light going to come from when it comes?’ Gentle asked, turning in his saddle to scan the horizon. As he craned round to look back the way they’d come a murmur of distress escaped his lips.
‘What is it?’ the mystif said, bringing its beast to a halt, and following Gentle’s gaze.
It didn’t need telling. A column of black smoke was rising from the cradle of the hills, its lower plumes tinged with fire. Gentle was already slipping from his saddle, and now scrambled up the rock face at their side to get a better sense of the fire’s location. He lingered only seconds at the top before scrambling down, sweating and panting.
‘We have to turn back,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Beatrix is burning.’
‘How can you tell from this distance?’ Pie said.
‘I know, damn it! Beatrix is burning! We have to go back.’ He climbed on to his doeki, and started to haul it round on the narrow path.
‘Wait,’ said Pie. ‘Wait, for God’s sake!’
‘We have to help them,’ Gentle said, against the rock face. ‘They were good to us.’
‘Only because they wanted us out!’ Pie replied.
‘Well, now the worst’s happened, and we have to do what we can.’
‘You used to be more rational than this.’
‘What do you mean: used to be? You don’t know anything about me, so don’t start making judgements. If you won’t come with me, fuck you!’
The doeki was fully turned now, and Gentle dug his heels into its flanks to make it pick up speed. There had only been three or four places along the route where the road had divided. He was certain he could retrace their steps back to Beatrix without much problem. And if he was right, and it was the town that was burning up ahead, he would have the column of smoke as a grim marker. Pie followed, after a time, as Gentle knew it must. The mystif was happy to be called a friend, but somewhere in its soul it was a slave.
They didn’t speak as they travelled, which was not surprising given their last exchange. Only once, as they mounted a ridge that laid the vista of foothills before them, with the valley in which Beatrix nestled still out of sight but unequivocally the source of the smoke, did Pie’oh’pah murmur:
‘Why is it always fire?’ and Gentle realized how insensitive he’d been to Pie’s reluctance to return.
The devastation that undoubtedly lay before them was an echo of the fire in which its adopted family had perished - a matter that had gone undiscussed between them since.
‘Shall I go from here without you?’ he asked.
Pie shook its head. Together, or not at all,’ it said.
The route became easier to negotiate from there on. The inclines were mellower and the track itself better kept, but there was also light in the sky, as the long-delayed dawn finally came. By the time they finally laid their eyes on the remains of Beatrix the peacock-tail glory Gentle had first admired in the heavens over Patashoqua was overhead, its glamour making grimmer still the scene laid below. Beatrix was still burning fitfully, but the fire had consumed most of the houses and their birch-bamboo arbours. He brought his doeki to a halt and scoured the place from this vantage-point. There was no sign of Beatrix’s destroyers.
‘On foot from here?’ Gentle said.
‘I think so.’
They tethered the beasts, and descended into the village. The sound of lamentation reached them before they were within its perimeters, the sobbing, emerging as it did from the murk of the smoke, reminding Gentle of the sounds he’d heard while keeping his vigil on the hill. The destruction around them now was somehow a consequence of that sightless encounter, he knew. Though he’d avoided the eye of the watcher in the darkness, his presence had been suspected, and that had been enough to bring this calamity upon Beatrix.
‘I’m responsible …’ he said. ‘God help me … I’m responsible.’
He turned to the mystif, who was standing in the middle of the street, its features drained of blood and expression.
‘Stay here,’ Gentle said. ‘I’m going to find the family.’
Pie didn’t register any response, but Gentle assumed what he’d said had been understood, and headed off in the direction of the Splendids’ house. It wasn’t simply fire that had undone Beatrix. Some of the houses had been toppled unburned, the copses around them uprooted. There was no sign of fatalities, however, and Gentle began to hope that Coaxial Tasko had persuaded the villagers to take to the hills before Beatrix’s violators had appeared out of the night. That hope was dashed when he came to the place where the Splendids’ home had stood. It was rubble, like the others, and the smoke from its burning timbers had concealed from him until now the horror heaped in front of it. Here were the good people of Beatrix, shovelled together in a bleeding pile higher than his head. There were a few sobbing survivors at the heap, looking for their loved ones in the confusion of broken bodies, some clutching at limbs they thought they recognized, others simply kneeling in the bloody dirt, keening.
Gentle walked around the pile, searching amongst the mourners for a face he knew. One fellow he’d seen laughing at the show was cradling in his arms a wife or sister whose body was as lifeless as the puppets he’d taken such pleasure in. Another, a woman, was burrowing in amongst the bodies, yelling somebody’s name. He went to help her, but she screamed at him to stay away. As he retreated he caught sight of Efreet. The boy was in the heap, his eyes open, his mouth - which had been the vehicle for such unalloyed enthusiasms - beaten in by a rifle butt or a boot. At that moment Gentle wanted nothing - not life itself - as much as he wanted the bastard who’d done this, standing in his sights. He felt the killing breath hot in his throat, itching to be merciless.
He turned from the heap, looking for some target, even if it wasn’t the murderer himself. Someone with a gun, or a uniform; a man he could call the enemy. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this way before, but then he’d never possessed the power he had now - or rather, if Pie was to be believed, he’d had it without recognizing the fact - and agonizing as these horrors were, it was salve to his distress, knowing there was such a capacity for cleansing in him; that his lungs, throat and palm could take the guilty out of life with such ease. He headed away from the cairn of flesh, ready to be an executioner at the first invitation.
The street twisted, and he followed its convolutions, turning a corner to find the way ahead blocked by one of the invaders’ war machines. He stopped in his tracks, expecting it to turn its steel eyes upon him. It was a perfect death-bringer, armoured as a crab, its wheels bristling with bloodied scythes, its turret with armaments. But death had found the bringer. Smoke rose from the turret, and the driver lay where the fire had found him, in the act of scrabbling from the
